Many of you of course know what it means. That it means wisdom and learning about this earth and all things in it. Many more of you of course know that in the last hundred years science has improved in a most wonderful way, and is improving every day; that we have now gas-lights, steam-engines, cotton-mills, railroads, electric telegraphs, iron ships, and a hundred curious and useful machines and manufactures of which our great-grandfathers never dreamed; that our knowledge of different countries, of medicines, of the laws of health and disease, and of all in short which has to do with man’s bodily life, is increasing day by day; and that all these discoveries are very great blessings; they give employment and food to millions who would otherwise have had nothing to do; they bring vast wealth into this country, and all the countries which trade with us. They enable this land of England to support four times as many human beings as it did two hundred years ago; they make many of the necessaries of life cheaper, so that in many cases a poor man may now have comforts which his grandfather never heard of.
I know that there is a dark side to this picture; that with all this increase of wisdom, there has come conceit, and trust in deceitful riches, and want of trust in God, and obedience to His law. I know that in some things we are not better, but worse than our forefathers; God forgive us for it! But the good came from God; and that man is very unwise and unthankful too, who despises God’s great gift of science, because fallen man has defiled His gift as it passed through his unclean hands.
Look only at this one thing, as I said just now, that by all these wonderful discoveries and improvements,
England is able to support four times as many Englishmen as it used of old, and that, if we feared God, and sought His kingdom better, I believe, England would support many more people yet—and see if that be not a thing to thank Almighty God for every day of our lives.
Now how did this wonderful change and improvement take place—suddenly, and, as it were, in the course of the last hundred years? Simply by mankind understanding the text (Prov. iii. 19), and by obeying it. I tell you a real truth, my friends, and it happened thus.
For more than sixteen hundred years after our Lord’s time, mankind seem to have become hardly any wiser about earthly things, nay, even to have gone back. The land was no better tilled; goods were no more easily made; diseases were no better cured, than they had been sixteen hundred years before. And if any learned men longed to become very wise and cunning, and to get power over this world and the things in it, they flew off to witchcraft, charms, and magic, deceived by the devil’s old lie, that the kingdom and the power and the glory of this world belonged to him and not to God.
But about two hundred and fifty years ago, it pleased God to open the eyes of one of the wisest men who ever lived, who was called Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, Lord Chancellor of England, and to show him the real and right way of learning by which men can fulfil God’s command to replenish the earth and subdue it. And Francis Bacon told all the learned men boldly that they had all been wrong together, and that their wisdom was no better than a sort of madness, as it is written, “The wisdom of man is foolishness with God;” that the only
way for man to be wise was to get God’s wisdom, the wisdom with which He had founded the earth, and find out God’s laws by which He had made this world.
“And then,” he said, “if you can do that, you will be able to imitate God in your own small way. If you learn the laws by which God made all things, you will be able to invent new things for yourselves. For you can only subdue nature by obeying her.” That was one of his greatest sayings, and by it he meant, that you can only subdue a thing and make it useful to you, by finding out the rules by which God made that thing, and by obeying them.
For instance, you cannot subdue and till a barren field, and make it useful, without knowing and obeying the laws and rules of that soil; and then you can subdue and conquer that field, and change and train it, as I may say, to grow what you like. You cannot conquer diseases without knowing and obeying the laws by which God has made man’s body, and the laws by which fever and cholera and other plagues come.